


to leave a trace

by endquestionmark



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-14 18:07:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4574550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Victoria is — beautiful, and poised, and everything that Saunders had warned Napoleon about; Napoleon gets the sense that Saunders warns him about things more for the paperwork than for his own good at this point, but — detached, he thinks, when he wanders through her party, the panels and screens and layers and layers of white. She’s dispassionate at best when he pulls himself to his feet and stumbles into her, and responds to his forays into innuendo with rather abstract amusement. Napoleon wants to know her well enough to see where she cracks. Everybody does, sooner or later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to leave a trace

**Author's Note:**

> I originally planned to write Victoria/a knife and Napoleon/a knife, with the only unifying factor in these ships the knife, but then I thought about the intersection of their performative selves and took a sudden detour into this, which is in brief me being delighted by and subsequently picking apart the torture scene. Canon-divergent in that Victoria doesn't leave when the chair malfunctions, but rather stays to enjoy the fruits of her labor. Accordingly, dead dove do not electrocute.

Victoria is — beautiful, and poised, and everything that Saunders had warned Napoleon about; Napoleon gets the sense that Saunders warns him about things more for the paperwork than for his own good at this point, but — detached, he thinks, when he wanders through her party, the panels and screens and layers and layers of white. She’s dispassionate at best when he pulls himself to his feet and stumbles into her, and responds to his forays into innuendo with rather abstract amusement. Napoleon wants to know her well enough to see where she cracks. Everybody does, sooner or later.

She doesn’t lose her composure for a moment in his hotel room, or at least not as much as he’d hoped. Napoleon takes Victoria to bed, or rather: euphemism; the chaise is involved, and the sideboard, quite briefly, and then the bedroom floor, when he fails to account for his case by the bed and stumbles over it. Victoria, half-dressed, doesn’t reach out for half a second, and Napoleon thinks for a moment that he’s got her, finally. It’s something about the tilt of her chin, or maybe the curve of her back.

It passes, though, and even when she’s gasping under him, nails scoring lines across the small of his back and his shoulders, he thinks: professional, is what she is. Both of them, right now, are being professionals — he, doing what comes naturally, falling back into old patterns and old habits; she, doing what is expected of her for the role that she is playing — and when Victoria kisses him, there’s no hunger to it at all, and nothing for him to read, to turn back on her. She’s a blank, picture-perfect from the golden spill of her hair across the pillow to the way she tips her head back, lips kiss-bruised, art that there’s no thrill to stealing, and for the first time in longer than he’d like to think about Napoleon feels fear down his spine, insatiate and intriguing, and wants.

Victoria sits, the next day, in her chair, at her desk, as if it’s a throne, and laid out before her a map table. Napoleon isn’t sure whether to take her disinterest as a dismissal (too obvious, he thinks) or, in her own way, an invitation (too circumspect). When he comes to strapped into an electric chair, though, he realizes: she hadn’t been expressing disinterest so much as anticipation.

In the basement, judging by the chill in the air and the echoing quality of footsteps, sitting behind a desk littered with spare parts and an espresso pot that’s seen better days, or perhaps been used as a blunt object, Victoria is positively effervescent. Haloed with light from the flickering bulb, she watches him test the straps, and indulges him in it; Napoleon finds himself completely immobile, and thinks that he’s found it — he’s found where she’ll shatter, if he simply applies pressure — and can’t quite look away.

“I really should leave you to the professional,” Victoria muses, sipping espresso, and here, Napoleon thinks, here it is, his cue.

“What a waste,” he says, “of a perfectly serviceable evening.” It must be evening by now, though he really has no idea. It’s evening down here, and he probably won’t live long enough to see anything else.

“I could say the same of yesterday,” Victoria says. “At least we’re being honest with each other now.” She considers him, eyes narrowed slightly, and Napoleon thinks of the first lock he picked. It had been by luck, mostly, given the quality of his tools and the age of the lock, an old spare that he’d found in the basement, remnant of a former tenant or a demolished building. He hadn’t known, then, the difference between a hook and a half-diamond, but he’d twisted the tension wrench, and held his breath, and when the first pin had set perfectly, Napoleon had felt it like an echo through his entire body.

He isn’t holding his breath now, watching Victoria look at him — they’re considering each other’s breaking points, he realizes — but he can almost feel the moment when she makes up her mind, that same infinitesimal click of pin on cylinder, that same resonance, one step closer.

“I suppose five minutes couldn’t hurt,” Victoria says, and nods at Rudi without for a moment looking away from Napoleon, and for a moment Napoleon can’t tell what’s happening — whether he’s missed it, whether the wiring has failed again — save for the feeling that he’s been pushed, just a moment out of step, and then it hits him, every muscle in his body seizing up at once. Again, and again, too quickly for him to properly experience it, and he’s wrong, he’s wrong: it isn’t Victoria who’s breaking, but him. He’ll shatter into mirrored pieces, and so much smoke.

It hits him then, all in a rush, the pain that was too much and too quick for him to process before, and Napoleon can’t keep himself from gasping at it, the involuntary cramps and exhaustion, as if he’d been pushed to his absolute limits. It hurts to flex his fingers, never mind struggling properly; it hurts to look over at Victoria, the way that he feels it in his skull when the glare of the sun is particularly bad, but he does it anyway, because he has to know.

She’s leaning forward, espresso forgotten and elbows on the desk; it reminds Napoleon of the way he looked at the first piece of art he had ever lifted, in Munich after the war. It had been a watercolor, a Kretzschmar small enough to tuck between the pages of a newspaper and carry under his arm, bold strokes and color-wash vivid enough to make him forget, for a minute, what he was doing. Living color, he had thought at the time, utterly unrealistic even at arm’s length — green standing in for whitewash, purple for lumber — but so vivid that he wanted to believe it anyway.

Victoria, now, is in living color, still as beautiful as ever and no less elegant, but this close, he knows better. He can see the artlessness to the wideness of her eyes, and the undisguised eagerness in her posture, and the flush of her cheeks, and there she is, no less dangerous, but finally just present enough for him to see properly.

“Again,” she says, as if discovering something for the first time, and Napoleon doesn’t look away this time — he can’t track her through the shaking, the rolling thud of it, an impact that just keeps coming — but Victoria can see him, the clench of his jaw and the way he feels as if his neck will break under the strain, braced as he is. He doesn’t want her to be able to look away; he wants her to watch him break, and shatter in sympathy, or at least in desire. If it’s all that he’s good for then he’ll take it for all that it’s — he’s — worth.

When the shocks stop this time, Napoleon realizes that he can’t feel his fingertips. That’s good; he doesn’t have to fake it, then, can live in the lie and become it for as long as he needs. A lie that he believes is a lie that he can’t be caught in, and making untruths real is perhaps the only true thing he knows anymore. He aches, down to his bones, and lets it wash over him.

“Go,” Victoria says to Rudi, or something — she says something, and he goes, which seems to be the way that things are done where she’s involved — and he pushes open the double doors by the desk, steps out of view. “A few moments alone,” she says, to Napoleon this time, and crosses the floor to him; when she leans over him, he doesn’t have to feign fear, doesn’t have to wonder whether the pressure of her fingertips on his temple would be too much. Of course it is; of course he’s scared. It’s true now and it would be true if it were a lie.

“Shouldn’t you be offering me a grape this time?” Napoleon says, and she leans in so close that he can’t focus on her face, though that might be the pain as well; he can see the curve of her smile, anyway, feels it slip under his ribs, and when Victoria steps back, she backhands him so hard that, for a moment, he can’t see more than a blur of light, can’t hear more than the empty numb ringing of shock.

“There,” she says, one foot on the pedal, absolutely intent on his face, and shifts her weight like a dancer, and this time is the worst yet. Napoleon doesn’t know if she’s changed the voltage, or if he’s simply beyond enduring this much, lead-weight-weary and juddering, but he smells skin burning — his, but that’s hard for him to remember — and that must be blood, flat and metallic in his mouth. He fights to keep his eyes open, and fails; his eyes roll back, and instead of darkness he sees a visceral red, shifting according to a nauseating pulse, and thinks that he was wrong, before, once again. This is when he breaks, this moment when his nose begins to bleed, or this moment, when he thinks that his spine will snap, or—

“Yes, well,” Victoria says, and Napoleon realizes too late the noises that he’s been making, helpless and agonized and, somehow, simultaneously relieved. “That’s enough for me, I think, though I would so like to — see this through, if you will.”

“Oh,” Napoleon manages, “don’t say you’re going.”

“Funny,” she says, entirely devoid of amusement, though the way that her smile lingers belies the lack of humor in her voice. She turns to go. “You did do very well, you know.”

 _Very well_. Odd compliment, from a woman more predator than person, but not the strangest that Napoleon’s heard in his life, and all the better for being true. He may be the one strapped down, but: Victoria wide-eyed and enthralled, watching him shake; Victoria behind her desk, watching him set his own hook; Victoria on guard, playing a part. Either Napoleon will get free, sooner or later, or he’ll die, and either way, he’ll be gone, just the smell of smoke and blood remaining. He has the measure of Victoria now, though — pieces to steal, from old habit, and pieces to use — and that she can’t run from, because for all that she’s no more person than he is, she’s something real.

The door opens. “So,” Rudi says. “A story, perhaps.”

Behind him, the door shuts; a guard walks down the corridor, or rather stumbles, and falls out of sight. A shadow, rather more familiar than Napoleon would like to consider, looms large. Cracks in a person, and the light shining through, and Napoleon pinned here like a specimen, but no more substance to him than a reflection: he licks the blood from his lip, and lets his head fall to the side, as much as he can, and smiles.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The [Kretschmar](http://www.lostart.de/Webs/EN/Datenbank/EinzelobjektFund.html?cms_param=EOBJ_ID%3D477900) is real and was discovered in Schwabing, Munich in 2012 in Cornelius Gurlitt's collection.


End file.
